Precision R5500 Hardware Upgrade Guide

Helping You Create Your Custom Gaming Computer

Precision R5500 Hardware Upgrade Guide

The Precision R5500 is 2U rackmount workstation. It is features a dual cpu socket mother board the supports X56XX series processors. The Precision R5500 also supports up to 192GB of memory, six hot pluggable 2.5″ hard drives, and up to 2 x 1100W Power Supplies. Check out our favorite Poweredge R5500 hardware upgrades below.

Where to buy?

If you haven’t already acquired a Precision R5500 we’d recommend checking out a company called Serverworlds. They sell the R5500’s cheap and they provide free ground shipping to the lower 48 states. You can click on this link and it’ll bring you directly to there R5500 Page: Precision R5500 Link. You can also try to snag them cheap on Ebay. However, Ebay can be a bit of a gamble because you never know what you are going to get.

The goal is to purchase the R5500 with a good processor(s) and memory already installed and then you can source the graphics cards, hard drives, and other optional components from other sources.

What Processor(s) should I get?

High Clock speed cpu’s are the way to go.

Recommended Processors:

Up to 2 x QC Xeon X5667 3.06Ghz 12MB 6.40GTs Processors | 3.46 Max Turbo Frequency (SLBVA)

Up to 2 x QC Xeon X5677 3.46Ghz 12MB 6.40GTs Processors | 3.73 Max Turbo Frequency (SLBV9)

Up to 2 x QC Xeon X5687 3.6Ghz 12MB 6.40GTs Processors | 3.86Ghz Max Turbo Frequency (SLBVY)

Up to 2 x 6C Xeon X5680 3.33Ghz 12MB 6.40GTs Processors | 3.60Ghz Max Turbo Frequency (SLBV5)

Up to 2 x 6C Xeon X5690 3.46Ghz 12MB 6.40GTs Processors | 3.73Ghz Max Turbo Frequency (SLBVX)

How much Memory should I get?

The base line should be a minimum of 12GB of memory. However, 16GB to 24GB would be ideal.

Memory PNs:

Precision R5500 4GB 2Rx8 PC3L 10600R ECC Reg

Precision R5500 8GB 2Rx4 PC3L 10600R ECC Reg

Precision R5500 16GB 2Rx4 PC3L 10600R ECC Reg

*12800r modules will work as well, they will just clock down to 1066Mhz or 1333Mhz depending on the CPU speed*

Recommended Memory configurations:

6 x 2GB PC10600R ECC Reg Modules (12GB)

4 x 4GB PC10600 ECC Reg Modules (16GB)

6 x 4GB PC10600R ECC Reg Modules (24GB)

4 x 8GB PC10600R ECC Reg Modules (32GB)

6 x 8GB PC10600R ECC Reg Modules (48GB)

It’s very important to use 10600R modules because they will run at the max speed supported by the system board and processor.

What Hard Drive should I get?

Ideally you would want to have a Solid-State Drive as your boot device as well an NVME.2 SSD to store your game libraries/large programs on. If you are limited on budget you could go with a small SSD for your boot device and a larger capacity 7.2K SATA drive to hold your larger files/programs/games.

Recommended SSD Drives:

Samsung 860 EVO 1TB 2.5 Inch SATA III Internal SSD (MZ-76E1T0B/AM)

Samsung 860 Evo 500GB 2.5 inch SATA III Internal SSD (MZ-76E500B/AM)

Recommended large Capacity SATA Drives:

Dell 1TB SATA 7.2K 6GBPS ES 2.5″ Hard Drive

Seagate 2TB Enterprise SATA 6Gb/s 2.5″ HDD

*NVME.2 Drives cannot be used as a boot device with this model workstation*

NVME.2 PCIe Adapter (You need this if you plan to install an NVME.2 Drive in to this system):

NVME.2 SSD Adapter *Required to Install NVME.2*

Recommended NVME.2 SSDs:

Samsung 960 EVO Series – 500GB NVMe – M.2 Internal SSD (MZ-V6E500BW)

Samsung 960 EVO Series – 1TB PCIe NVMe – M.2 Internal SSD (MZ-V6E1T0BW)